Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  The sheets were the hardest, being long and unwieldy and much mended, but somehow I managed, and there was a huge sense of relief and power that filled me once I saw those clotheslines full. I usually finished the morning off with a sauna myself—although the heat from the kiuas had made me sweat enough already.

  Then it was back into the house to replace the cloths on Mother’s, Aini’s, and Eino’s heads and the bricks around Ronny and to try to eat something—even if it were just stale bread—with some broth. Every morning I tried to make coffee just as Mother did, grinding beans by hand, and putting them into the coffee pot with a pinch of salt (no egg, however). She considered putting eggs into coffee wasteful.

  Oh, during the space of time it had taken the sun to move from east to west on the second day, I realized I had forgotten the chickens. Once I got into the coop to collect the eggs, a day late and a dollar short, as Father used to say, they reminded me in no uncertain terms that they had been without food for days. The rooster almost attacked me, and the hens all came down from their roosts to share the bounty I spread out for them—two days’ worth of food.

  I knew I’d have to be more careful as the days went by, because I wasn’t sure which of the eggs I had collected were good and which maybe not, so I tried making a batch of pulla—Finnish sweet bread—adding the eggs one at a time after having broken each one into a separate cup. The extra eggs made the pulla especially good, I thought, as I mixed in the butter, which I brought from the well, sugar from the barrel that was getting low, and just the right amount of flour—not too much, not too little—as Mother had taught me.

  I was careful to braid the dough from the middle to each end, and took a second to look with pride at my concoction even though it had taken me away from the task I most abhorred and really needed to do again right after milking during that second morning—pouring the fresh milk through the separator, through which the cream was skimmed off and the milk left ready to put into the milk pails. I despised cleaning the separator, because it has many round sections through which the milk ran, separating the milk from the cream. Every piece had to be washed thoroughly because even a little bit of stale milk sticking to the pieces made the new milk rancid. How I hated that separator!

  “Now, Maria,” Mother told me, “make sure every piece is immaculate before you dry it.” I knew if I didn’t handle the milk right away, it would spoil, and we would lose money because we wouldn’t have our quota of cream and milk when the milk-wagon from the Cook Cooperative Creamery came around—if it ever did.

  Perhaps—I couldn’t help but think—everyone around me was ill, and I was the only person in this whole world who wasn’t sick. Little did I know then that I was almost correct. I found out that millions died during that influenza pandemic, which swept through the whole world, killing more people than the World War had. But that information reached me much latter. Then my concern was for our own area. No smoke was coming from the Lofgren’s chimney nor from Kivimaki’s, but I couldn’t worry about them. I had enough to worry about taking care of our house. They would have to make do as best they could.

  I spent a lot of time as I was cleaning up after Mother and Aini and trying to warm Ronny up and worrying about Eino thinking about Dr. Raihala and the hospital in Virginia. “If I could only get my family there,” I thought. But as soon as I thought of the hospital, I also remembered the “pest house” where desperately ill people were brought… usually to die.

  Every time that thought of getting everyone to Virginia crossed my mind, however, I realized how unrealistic it was. We didn’t have a carriage—only a wagon—and no horse to pull it, thanks go Father’s shenanigans.

  It occurred to me, however, that it might be helpful to let others know about the sickness that had beset us, and so early one morning I made a sign—“Sickness here”—to put on the fence post at the end of the driveway. Just in case someone would contact Dr. Raihala, he’d know to stop here on his rounds.

  How I kept going I’ll never know! I tried to catch a few hours sleep in the darkest part of the night—although that was also often the very worst time for Ronny, whose fever would climb—not from the bricks, I hoped—so that he was kicking covers off rather than cowering underneath them. I added him to my cool-cloth, cool-water-and-beef-broth regimen with great worry. There had been nothing left for him to vomit and no diarrhea for days by then, and I feared desperately he had passed from one stage into a worse one. His color turned, too, with brownish spots appearing. And when he coughed, as he did a lot, it seemed as if he were coughing up his whole insides.

  Mother and Aini seemed weaker every day, too, their fevers unchecked no matter how many times I tried to sponge them off with cool water and to hold a teaspoon to their lips so they could swallow some cool water and some broth.

  I spent the days and nights so busy that most of the time I wasn’t as terrified as I became in retrospect.

  But one day followed the next, until finally one morning, Mother’s fever broke. In her almost normal voice she asked, “Is there any coffee?”

  Aini’s return to normalcy seemed to take a bit longer, but gradually she, too, began to return to the living.

  Only Ronny and Eino remained ill and the three of us worried about them. When Ronny coughed, mucus came up from his lungs, which sounded as if they were full of water. But thanks perhaps or hopefully to my continued ministrations, Eino’s fever, too, finally began to go down.

  Then, suddenly, when we were in the depths of despair about Ronny, who seemed worse every day, his fever alternately dropping so he was shivering, and rising again until he was burning hot, a light appeared in the wilderness. We heard a horse and buggy stop near the fencepost as if to allow the driver to read the sign, and then it turned and continued until it reached the house.

  Soon down jumped Dr. Raihala, spruce as always in his celluloid collar and black hat, carrying his black bag.

  I rushed to greet him, hugging him with all my heart, and dragging him toward the house at the same time, trying to explain what had happened and was happening to everyone so quickly I’m afraid the words just made a mumble of sound without any sense. He did take a good look at Mother, Aini, and Eino, and nodded, as if satisfied, although all three were still abed, too weak to get up except to use the chamber pot and to sip some water and some more broth.

  I’m not quite sure what he did for Ronny. He sent me out of the room, and I heard him pounding on Ronny’s back, as if he could force the water out of his lungs and the mucus from his—what I learned later—esophagus. He had used a device he called a “stethoscope”—something new, he told us, that he had great faith in. He said it had allowed him to “listen” to Ronny’s lungs and to proceed with forceful action to move his insides around. I still think it sounds very strange, but whatever he did, it worked. Ronny’s coughing resulted in huge blobs of mucus that Dr. Raihala let drop into a towel. Ronny’s recovery commenced with whatever Dr. Raihala had done. By the next morning he—like Mother and Aini—was asking for coffee and maybe some pulla to dunk into it and some oatmeal to eat (providing I made it nice and thin).

  “You’ve done some good work here, young lady,” Dr. Raihala told me when Mother and Aini and Ronny all explained to him how I had taken charge. “You’ve kept your family alive. No nurse at our hospital in Virginia could have improved on what you did. Keeping them cool, keeping them hydrated—with the water and the broth, and keeping them clean—that was all you could do, and you did it exceptionally well. By the way, how old are you?”

  I know that my face was red—both from the heat and from his kind words, which I appreciated more than he could possibly know. I had not known what to do, but inadvertently it seemed I had done all of the right things. I grinned at him, smiling from ear to ear, happy and relieved to hear that my best had been good enough.

  “I’m twelve—going on thirteen,” I answered and followed with a qu
ick question: “How about Eino?” I feared the worst but hoped for the best.

  “He, too, will recover, given time. Now it’s time for you to rest.”

  And rest I did. I even skipped that night’s sauna. I fell into bed beside Aini, and slept the clock around, leaving Mother and Ronny and Aini to do the light work that involved taking care of themselves and Eino.

  Had I only known that would be my last night of real rest, I would have slept longer! Or perhaps, had I been aware of what was to greet me in the morning, I wouldn’t have managed to sleep at all.

  2: More of the Same

  When I awoke the following morning, I had no idea of the challenge that would lie before me before the end of that day. Nor had I any conception until later how very fortunate we had been.

  For the first time in weeks, Mother was up before me, grinding fresh coffee and starting a batch of fresh bread. She was still in her nightgown and obviously very weak because she had to pause every few minutes to sit down, but at least she seemed much better, and I was enormously relieved.

  After finishing the milking, this time cleaning the manure that had accumulated behind the stanchions and herding the cows out toward the pasture with Koira’s help, I volunteered to put the milk through the separator and to clean it. Mother knew how much I hated that job, and she stopped to give me a loving look and to whisper a quick, “Kiitos.” (Thank you.) She wasn’t a hugging sort of person, but the love she felt for us she expressed in so many ways that we were all deeply aware of its warmth.

  Barely had I sat down after washing the parts of the separator, covering the whole contraption with cotton, and shoving it into the corner where it usually sat, when we heard the sound of hoofbeats and a yell, “Whoo-hoo is anyone home?” (The words were in Finnish.)

  Mother and I hurried outside just as August Leinonen almost fell off the horse he was riding. We helped him into the house, feeling the heat of his fever and aware of his weakness.

  “Help!” he managed. “Not for us. I’m the only one up. Everyone else is sicker than I am. But someone’s yelling for help from the top of Hauala’s barn.”

  Mother and I exchanged glances. I was healthy, tired but well. I could go.

  We helped August back onto his horse after giving him fresh cold water and some of the warm broth that still simmered on the back of the stove. He nodded, seemed able to keep that down, and said he was in a hurry to get home. “Ma and Pa and all of the kids are sicker than I am,” he told us, holding back a cough, and set off over the fields for home.

  It took Mother and me just a few minutes to gather the supplies I thought I’d need: fresh rags (I was so grateful I had kept up with the washing), some more Vicks Vapo-Rub, a jar of beef broth, as many eggs as I felt I could safely carry, some bleach for sanitizing, and a bar of Mother’s home-made lye soap. Mother wrapped it all in some clean towels and a sheet, fashioned the whole into a bag she was able to hang on my back, and I set off for Haualas to do what I could to help.

  Little did I know what I was in for.

  The Haualas were far wealthier than we. Instead of the two-room log homestead cabin where we lived, their house had two stories. Mr. Hauala had ordered the whole building from the Sears & Roebuck catalog two years before, and it had come with everything needed, including two flights of stairs—one from the side porch and one from the living area, both leading to the second floor, where there were three bedrooms—one at the top of the living room stairway and two more on the right just past the upstairs hallway that led from front to back. It was a marvelous house with its walls painted a clean white and wainscoting, varnished to a sheen, lining the walls of the kitchen. Their pump sat in the kitchen, not outside as ours was, and their woodstove had a warming oven atop the stove plates. Its stovepipe led upstairs with a register in the first bedroom so the upstairs would warm up during the winter.

  All in all, it had been spectacular to watch it going up, including a cupboard with shelving along the walls of the upstairs hallway where Mrs. Hauala could store towels, sheets, pillow-cases, and extra clothing. There was even a shelf of books on the lower left hand side. Once, when we had gone there for a “coffee kekkuri,” (a get-together) I had found those books and devoured them—especially Tarzan, the Ape Man.

  At any rate, I crossed the field and was nearing the house when I saw Mr. Hauala, lying flat on the ground just outside of the barn. Running to his side, I feared he had fallen. But once I touched him, I realized he had collapsed from weakness. His forehead was burning hot.

  “Bring me into the sauna,” he directed me. “And fill the kiuas (the sauna stove) and the water tubs with water from the well house.” The words didn’t come out exactly in that order nor were they as clear, but I caught the drift of his advice and hurried to do as he had told me. Once I had everything full of water—the water section of the kiuas, every wash tub, every bucket, every dishpan—I helped him get out of his clothing, which was filthy with dirt mixed with vomit and diarrhea and tried to fix him some washing water, but he waved me off. “They need you worse than me.” he said, motioning toward the house.

  The minute I entered, I realized something was hideously wrong. From the minute I stepped into the house, using the front door, which led into a sunroom and thence into the living area, I knew things in this house were bad. The smell alone had me gagging. The kitchen floor, usually covered with sparkling clean linoleum, was spotted with vomit and diarrhea. Thank God Mrs. Hauala had lined the clean linoleum with newspapers as Finnish women were wont to do to keep the floor as clean as possible, so the first thing I did was to gather up the newspapers and throw the whole mess outside for me to worry about later.

  The line of vomit and diarrhea led me from the side porch up the side porch steps and toward the upstairs hallway. I scraped every step into a dustpan before I stepped on it, backed out, and threw that out the door. Before I started that, however, I had checked to see whether a fire was burning in the wood stove in the kitchen. Of course, it wasn’t. People like the Haualas had a summer-kitchen—a separate building where they could heat a wood stove and do the cooking in order to keep the house cool.

  So my first job was to find some kindling—the woodbox was full, thank God—and get a fire started in the kitchen wood stove. Once I had the kitchen stove going, regardless of the heat it would add to an already hot day, I filled the water holder on the side and every bucket and dish pan with water from the pump and set them all on the stove to heat.

  Only then did I start up the back stairs. The water wasn’t hot enough for me to wash each one, so I had to step on the residual vomit and diarrhea as I was going upstairs, gagging all the way and trying not to vomit myself. Thank God for the Vicks, which I had slathered on my nose and even into my nostrils.

  By the time I got upstairs, the smells were staggering in their intensity. I headed first for the worst area—the back bedroom on the left. There, covered in their own soil lay the two Hauala boys, obviously dead. Unbelievably, they had turned blue before they died. The odor of death and decomposing bodies—for they must have lain there in the heat for days—was almost overpowering. But I thought, I can’t help them, and hurriedly shut the door on the horror and headed for the two who lay on the double-bed in the first bedroom to the left.

  They writhed in pain, holding their heads, and trying to speak with throats that had swollen shut. I had passed them by as I headed for the worst of it, and they were desperate for help. As soothingly as I could, I pulled their clothing off, throwing it out the upstairs window onto the roof of the sunroom, where it lay for days until Mr. Hauala finally got back on his feet and was able to help me. Running back downstairs, I filled a bucket with cold water, rushed back up the stairs, and, using the rags I had brought from home, began to sponge them off, one at a time. Each of the girls—for there were two of them—Elsie and Violet—was able to take a sip of cold water, and they thanked me with their eyes
as I turned them over to change the soiled sheets. They were so hot I hesitated to cover them even with a sheet, but I did manage to get a fresh sheet underneath each one after I was through with the sponging.

  “Ma…” one of them stammered, “how is she?”

  “Where is she?” I asked, really aware of the answer before it came.

  “The bedroom at the head of the stairs,” came the answer I had feared.

  I should have run there first because I knew that the heat from the kitchen woodstove was coming up through the register, adding “insult to injury”—a phrase I was later to learn.

  When I got there, however, my worst fears were fulfilled: their mother would not suffer from the heat or from any more pain or cruel power. Evidently she had passed gently from this earth into a place of peace. Unlike the boys, she was lying between the sheets, in her nightgown, with the spread carefully folded back at the end of the bed. She must have known she was leaving, for she had drawn the shade against the afternoon sun, crossed her arms over her chest, and simply slept away. There was no evidence of the horror that had attended the boys’ passing. It was as if she had simply lain down to rest, knowing it was time for her to leave all else behind—all sorrow, all pain. I know it must have been difficult for her to let go of her children and her husband, but she seemed to have found within herself the strength to release all holding her to earth.